Backing Up Social Media

After my debacle with Facebook last month (see my post HERE), I thought it might be helpful to write something on the importance of backing-up your social media accounts.

Honestly, even though I back-up my website/blog regularly, I never even gave a single thought to Twitter or Facebook.

Below, I show you how to make an archive of Twitter …

First, open the ‘Settings and Privacy’ option on the dropdown menu when you click on your profile image …

This will bring you to the following page …

Click on ‘Request Your Archive’.

You will receive the following message from Twitter …

In a short time, you should receive an email that contains a zip file with your entire Twitter account backed up. You will need to extract the zip file and open it.

You will see a few folders and buttons, like this …

If you click on the ‘index.html’ button, it will open up your web browser and bring you to your account. Please note, depending on how many tweets you’ve ever tweeted, it make take some time to load and respond …

As you can see, it gives me an archive of every single tweet I’ve ever posted since I began in 2013.

Unfortunately, this is where things get a bit fuzzy. I have searched and searched for what to do next, or if this automatically repopulates your feed without having to input each one manually (for me, this is definitely an impossible proposition). After all, as this page says, it is an offline archive of your tweets.

Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way of backing up your followers or follows. Which worries me, as I have 21.2K followers right now. I have tried saving the webpage, but only a limited amount of followers save, as the page is a live scroll that updates as you scroll down. Also, I tried a site called ‘Archive This’, but when I click on ‘My Followers’, the URL is a generic one: https://twitter.com/followers rather than linked to my profile. The same with ‘Following’, ‘Likes’, and all the rest. The only page that differs is ‘My Tweets’. I don’t know why Twitter has done this, but it means that Archive This and other such tools can’t archive my private followers page. All rather frustrating.

What my Googling did dig up is that various software programs do exist to help you out. They can recover up to 200 DMs (Direct Messages) as well as your tweets. Two stand out: Snap Bird and Tweet Download. At the time of writing, both remain free. Here is a Youtube video telling you about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH9J8qkasKs

You can also request your Twitter Data. From the same page that you requested the tweet archive, go to the left-hand menu and select ‘Your Twitter Data’. This opens up the following a page that shows you information on blocked accounts, accounts that you’ve muted, lists you appear on, and your account details and date you created your account, etc. At the very bottom of the page, you have a clickable link that says ‘Request Your Data’. If you click on this, Twitter will send you an email when it’s ready, just like for your tweet archive.

Thanks for sharing, Harmony. I never considered SM backup to be an option.
I’ve noticed some Twitter accounts suddenly drop their “following” list to 0. That would really suck. Perhaps it’s just a glitch, but I’ve seen it happen so many times. He/she tweets out a message stating that they are having a problem with their account, but people are already unfollowing them because they assume they were unfollowed. It’s too bad. I’m not sure how it gets fixed or even if it can, but it would totally suck.
Has anyone experienced this? Your “following” list suddenly drop to 0? Thanks again for sharing. 🙂

You’re welcome, Natalie! I haven’t experienced this yet and hope I never do, as it has taken years to get up to my 20.2k followers! Yikes. I did get hacked, and DMs went out that weren’t from me. However, I managed to get in and change my security stuff. Happily I didn’t have loads of unfollows. 🙂

Now we need a safe place to store our backups! I have most of my stuff on Dropbox and live in fear of the program getting hacked or crashing. I’ve had memory sticks before that say the file is corrupt when I try to reuse them, so now I just do a lot of praying to the science gods, lol

I may be thinking wrong, but I never back up anything but my fiction. Even my blog isn’t backed up. Tweets and even blog posts have the lifespan of a gnat. I might lose one or two things that have a longer lifespan, but as long as my followers are still with me I can write more. Yeah, occasionally someone googles and finds one of my older posts, but it isn’t that often. I even have a couple that are consistent producers. Am I missing something here? If there were a way to make sure my followers would re-connect I would absolutely back that up. Open to any advice.

Hi Craig, Old posts on your blog aren’t the pertinent point of backing up your website but your whole site platform. If it crashes or anything, without a back-up, you’ll have to redesign from scratch. A website back-up would also contain your blog followers, so that would prove useful. I plan to continue looking into how to get my Twitter followers back in the event of a total meltdown, lols. So, watch this space! 🙂

The followers are the important thing, them and the ones I follow. I would hate to have to rebuild everything, but maybe the place needs a facelift anyway. Maybe I should backup for the sake of my following.

I’m like Craig, I’ve never backed up anything either. I do have original hard copies of my blog posts. More than anything, I’d want to back up my followers, but I’m not sure that’s doable using WP’s free site. Maybe just an export? Ugh!

I back my writing up to three different sources (computer, stick, and cloud), but never thought about social media. Eesh!i may have to give the Twitter back-up a try. Thanks for an informative post, Harmony!

I did, too. I wasn’t a location I had to manage (like my website) so I figured the responsibility was on them. I knew, on some level, they were within their rights to lock me out or delete me, but I never considered my stuff might just be lost.

Gee, I never considered backing up social media, either. Oddly enough, I just received my data from Twitter, which I thought I may need someday. Thanks for the advice. I’ll be looking into backing up social media along with everything else. Oy.